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Interested in Drupal?

  • Yes

    Votes: 7 14.3%
  • No

    Votes: 35 71.4%
  • Tell me more

    Votes: 7 14.3%

  • Total voters
    49
There is a ZERO chance we would switch to Drupal over so many objections. That doesn't mean we can't talk about the possibility. Any other site would just switch...

There's really very, very little cost in setting up a Drupal site. So I don't see why you can't experiment with it.

I think the resistance you are seeing on this forum is based mostly on fear. You are asking us if we would like to eat a tangerine, when all we've ever eaten are apples. You can tell us, "It's like an apple, only orange in color, and it's got lots of cool flavor and all these other benefits," but to most of us it seems like you are saying, "It's not an apple. It's therefore scary."

Give us a tangerine (a Drupal-based Blazers or NBA site), and we can better tell you if we like it.

You've got nothing to lose but time. And if you are like me, you probably see Drupal as a cool new trick that'll be fun to figure out rather than a drudgery. So the time issue is probably irrelevant.
 
Add what you want to add, as long as the thread style is the same. How about a "Road Trippin' with Big John" video to watch my show. Let's do it!
 
You've got nothing to lose but time. And if you are like me, you probably see Drupal as a cool new trick that'll be fun to figure out rather than a drudgery. So the time issue is probably irrelevant.

And with the lockout here, there's an abundance of time on our hands. I'd play in an experimental Drupal site if you set it up, Denny. Why not, right?
 
Im not into the "busyness" of drupal. Way to much ish on the screen just to read discussions about basketball. This format is pretty nice and easy to use and gets you to the info you want, easy.

Im in favor of staying vb
 
I realize this forum is having trouble attracting new posters, but I don't think it's the software. The internet is ever evolving and forums seem to be fading away. First it was chat rooms, then forums, now everyone seems to be going more towards things like Twitter, which doesn't appeal to me at all.
The problem is, none of the newer formats are remotely useful for carrying on a discussion. I've yet to see a viable replacement for forums. CMS/forum solutions appear to be little different than blog comments. Lots of people post to them, but very few people read what others have posted. It's a stream of thoughts, not a conversation.
 
Wouldn't be prudent. [/GHWB]

As a site owner, I can see why you'd be interested. As a mere poster, I don't give a crap about anything but message board functionality, so if vBulletin is the best, then there's no reason at all to change. Home pages, blogs, news feeds, etc.: Not interested. Do not want.

barfo

Ditto.

This works. Put your efforts to working for something that needs it, like world peace.
 
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I only spent about 3 hours on it to get it to this point.
 
I'm not posting there if Batman is posting there.
 
Looks pretty intriguing. Can you post a link? It'd be fun to play with it while you continue developing it.
 
That's purdy. Nice work.
 
Personally, I'm really only looking for a good conversation format with nice presentation...not a total content management service. I don't particularly believe in "one stop shops" on the Internet, I'm happy to go to one specialized site after another (one purely meant for discussion forums, one that's a blog, one that presents all the latest news, etc). Sites that purport to do everything tend to do everything poorly. In my experience, anyway.

If the site switches over to Drupal, I'll try it out and re-evaluate if I enjoy the site.
 
I realize this forum is having trouble attracting new posters, but I don't think it's the software. The internet is ever evolving and forums seem to be fading away. First it was chat rooms, then forums, now everyone seems to be going more towards things like Twitter, which doesn't appeal to me at all.

I am doing research on how forums can adapt or even compete with social media sites.

One reason why Drupal was brought up is, it comes with programs/software that will do just that. However, in theory we should be able to get these programs individually. And another reason it was brought is because the guy switched to it, even though he knew vBulletin was a much better forum.

I am following one admins crusade on the internet about some things he is doing to compete against Facebook, twitter, etc: He just started doing what he is doing. I want to see the results first.

As for drawing people here, it takes promotion. I plan on starting today, long term. I have been and will continue to try and get in new staff. The best way to do that, is from established posters, but many of our forums are too weak to do that.
 
I don't know that Drupal is the way to go. Is BlazersEdge powered by Drupal? Is that the sort of environment you envision creating with it? Because if so, I think the BE format sucks. It's less of a conversation and more of a "article-->reply to article" environment.

On our site, the thread starter sometimes has the least interesting thing to say. It's the followup conversation that really drives some of the great threads.

People like forums. But it sounds like you guys are getting tired of Vbulletin. Have you looked at alternative bulletin board systems? I know Simple Machines Forums just released the finalized 2.0 rev. It's supported by a broad open source community, with lots of available free add-ons. Might be worth looking at.

Not tired of vB, but they did lose some talented people when they started Xenforo.

In my case its not the board. It's what we can add to it, to make it grow.
 
Shit, 90% of Twitter posts I read don't make sense to me. It's usually some sentence fragments with some odd characters mixed in and no context from which to derive any coherent meaning. I can't wait for twitter, too, to go the way of the Dodo bird.

I like this forum and this format. If the proposed new software is largely the same format, with the same functionality, but some extra bells and whistles that I couldn't care less about, then it's fine. Otherwise, not so much.

And no, I don't really want to share our game threads with Flakers "fans."

Denny can manipulate Drupal to look like and function like a message board.
 
I can see Denny's hope; all the random conversations we have about other teams will do the job of seeding the other teams' sections and hopefully draw more users to the site who right now see Portland's forum and a bunch of ghost towns. Basically, he wants to use our posts more efficiently to fuel growth in other "forums".

Nice post! :smiley-bouncy:
 
The problem is, none of the newer formats are remotely useful for carrying on a discussion. I've yet to see a viable replacement for forums. CMS/forum solutions appear to be little different than blog comments. Lots of people post to them, but very few people read what others have posted. It's a stream of thoughts, not a conversation.

This, is how I see it as well.
 
As for drawing people here, it takes promotion. I plan on starting today, long term. I have been and will continue to try and get in new staff. The best way to do that, is from established posters, but many of our forums are too weak to do that.
So, do you want us to go spam other sites? It might give us something fun to do during the lockout. We could have a competition: sites spammed; number of site bannings; things like that. :)
 
I can see Denny's hope; all the random conversations we have about other teams will do the job of seeding the other teams' sections and hopefully draw more users to the site who right now see Portland's forum and a bunch of ghost towns. Basically, he wants to use our posts more efficiently to fuel growth in other "forums".

That's a pretty smart strategy, actually.
 
I can see Denny's hope; all the random conversations we have about other teams will do the job of seeding the other teams' sections and hopefully draw more users to the site who right now see Portland's forum and a bunch of ghost towns. Basically, he wants to use our posts more efficiently to fuel growth in other "forums".


So Denny is a Socialist? I knew it!!!
 
There is always this debate about quality of posts vs quantity. Some sites push for quality, and to the extent that the moderation is draconian. To me, quantity us fine, but ideally there would be a way to filter out the crap. Out of a million posts, some pct are going to be great, even if the pct is low it's a lot of great content.

And ideally the software should facilitate the kinds of things that people want to do. Part of my argument for quantity is that a message board can act synchronously or asynchronously. In synchronous mode, you're in a thread the same time others are, and the thread is like a chat room. Asynchronously, you start a thread and someone else replies hours or even days later. Often it's a mixture of the two in a thread...

Some posts are like articles on a news type site, or even quote others' articles in a blog like manner. While vb does let us promote posts to blogs and articles, and it has a CMS, the integration is weak or downright poor.

Two other types of content we all likely have created at least once are tables (like stats) and pages like a post with links to good blog sites. vBulletin doesn't handle these well - tables/preformatted text is awkward at best, and stickies and links (like at the top of this forum) get in the way, no?

Another kind of content that I can create, but vb limits you all from doing is dynamic content. Our salary pages are one example, as are twitter feeds, RSS feeds, etc. I would personally like to see there be custom software so we can make mock drafts, implement sim leagues, fantasy leagues, construct player pages, etc.

Granted, these things may not appeal to everyone, but it seems like not having the options is not the best.

In any case, the priority is to provide the tools to enable you all, and to provide the best online experience we can. If that means vb, so be it. For just a message board, it still seems like the best we can do.
 
If the site changes, do I still have to pay $100 a month like I do now to post here?
 
I think I'd be less upset than most if something changed, but put me in the HCP category of "if it ends up like O-Live (or even BE), it'll be tough to keep posting as much".

That said, I think specific user-interface issues I have are things that are non-Blazer specific. For instance, during the draft there was a Blazers thread, a main page thread, and a couple of "what do you think about our pick" threads in team-specific forums. I'm relatively certain that if, for instance, a poster dropping into the GSW forum during the draft night got into a 200-post thread about the draft (even if it's heavily Blazer-influenced) it'd be better than reading the three posts in the GSW forum, deciding that his opinion wasn't worth the time it took to add to get the little amount of discussion on it, and then he leaves. Or when you're talking about a DEN-POR trade, to have it tagged (if that's the right word) into both forums so that all of the content was in one place...instead of having 100 comments in the Blazer forum and 3 in the Nuggets forum. I'd love game threads to be in a chatroom-style format...seems like they'd go quicker and scrolling back would be easier. And an in-forum repository for things like long articles/blog posts; and if we ever do a gamecast or something, the ability to have that hosted here would be nice.

Just my $0.02.
 
Having "mirrored threads," that exist in two forums simultaneously, is something I've long thought would be cool. So, both forums see the same thread...any additions to the thread, whether from the Portland or Denver forum, are reflected in both forums. A poster could create a thread in each forum and have an option to link them. Or just create the thread once and have an option to "reflect it" into another forum. Obviously, forum mods would have the ability to break links if the feature is being abused, much as they have the ability to close/delete threads that they view as off-topic or spam.
 
So, what, if someone drops a GSW reference in a Portland/Denver game thread, then all of a sudden the GSW forum has a 200 post game thread they don't give a rip about?

If I wanted to talk to the Denver fans about the game, I'd go to the Denver forum.
 
So, what, if someone drops a GSW reference in a Portland/Denver game thread, then all of a sudden the GSW forum has a 200 post game thread they don't give a rip about?

If I wanted to talk to the Denver fans about the game, I'd go to the Denver forum.

No. When you post, you can post to more than one forum is all. Drupal is based upon tags, not proper forums/places. So Blazers posts are automatically tagged as Blazers and show up in the Blazers forum, but the thread starter can also say, "tag this as NBA, Game Thread, Nuggets" and it would appear in all those places too.
 
No. When you post, you can post to more than one forum is all. Drupal is based upon tags, not proper forums/places. So Blazers posts are automatically tagged as Blazers and show up in the Blazers forum, but the thread starter can also say, "tag this as NBA, Game Thread, Nuggets" and it would appear in all those places too.
Thanks.
 
With 37 no votes and 6 yes votes, it's highly unlikely we're switching. I hope we can at least keep the dialogue going about it and if it makes sense to switch at some point, we can.
 

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